'I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his Twa Dogs as one of the most disagreeable of all employments. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods—a reader of curious books when I could get them—a gleaner of old traditional stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or firth rather (the Bay of Cromarty), with a little clear stream on the one side and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, and which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet.'

He was to experience constant fits of depression and exhaustion, which caused sleep-walking; and though this after a time passed away, it was yet in later years to recur with fatal effects. In his master he was fortunate. He was one who would fully have come up to Carlyle's standard of his own father, 'making a conscience of every stone he laid.' Unconsciously, also, the apprentice was laying the foundations of the educated sense of sight so essential to the mason, and which was to stand him in excellent service in later years of geological ramblings. But the life was a hard one, from the surroundings in which the trade of a north-country mason had to be carried on. Living in a small village, where the lack of steady employment was naturally often felt, he had to eke out a living by odd jobs in the country, building farm-steadings or outhouses, with but scanty shelter and in surroundings too often unfavourable to comfort or morality. His experience of the bothy-system thus acquired by personal hardship he was in later years to turn to account in his leaders in The Witness—'I have lived,' he says, 'in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the over-flowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge.' He was now to feel the truth of his uncles' warnings in dissuading him from the occupation. They had pointed to a hovel on a laird's property, who had left it standing that at some future date it might be turned to profit when he should have a drove of swine, or when a 'squad' of masons would pass that way. The life which had been introduced by the large farm system had been criticised already by Burns, who in the jottings of his Highland Tour had been struck by the superior intelligence of the Ayrshire cottar to the stolid boorishness of the agricultural labourer in the districts of the Lothians and the Merse. Recent legislation has largely mitigated the evils of the system which, even in a higher scale of comfort, has received a stern indictment in the eighth chapter of Dr. William Alexander's excellent work which we have before quoted, and to which, as the classic of the movement with which Miller's life is associated, we shall again refer. 'Better,' said Cobbett, who had studied it during a brief sojourn in the country, 'the fire-raisings of Kent than the bothy system of Scotland.'

Even geological rambles and communings with the Muse afforded but scant alleviation of the hardships endured. During rainy weather the food would often be oatmeal eaten raw, at times with no salt save from a passing Highland smuggler, or consist of hastily prepared gruel or brochan. In time he learned to be a fair plain cook and baker, so as at least to satisfy the demands of the failing teeth of his old master. Accordingly, he was not sorry when the three years of his apprenticeship closed, and as a skilled labourer he could retire about the Martinmas of 1822 to Cromarty, where his first piece of work was a cottage built with his own hands for his aunt.

In 1823 he was with a working party at Gairloch, and was there for the last time to experience the discomforts in the life of the working mason when employed by a niggard Highland laird. Forced from the barn in which they were at first domiciled into a cow-house to make room for the hay, they found themselves called upon to convert the materials of this hovel into the new building upon which they were engaged. This they effected by demolishing the entrance gradually, and hanging mats over it, leaving themselves ultimately to the cold October wind which not even Miller's experiences as a boy of the caves in the Sutors of Cromarty could render tolerable. But he had begun to see that the sphere of constant employment was narrow and narrowing in his native place, and, as the building mania in the South at the time seemed to afford a better opening for a steady workman, to Edinburgh accordingly he resolved to betake himself.

There was the additional reason in a desire to free the family from the burden of a house on the Coalhill of Leith, which had long before fallen to his father through the legacy of a relative, and which had threatened, through legal expenses, lack of tenants, and depreciated value, to become a serious legacy indeed. The parish church of North Leith had been erected, and he had been rated as a heritor for a sum so considerable that the entire year's rental of the dilapidated tenement was swallowed up, together with most of his savings as a mason. He had come of age when in the miserable hovel at Gairloch we have described, and was now competent to deal with his luckless property. Setting sail in the Leith smack running between Cromarty and that port, he entered the Firth of Forth four days after losing sight of the Sutors. He saw with interest Dunottar Castle and the Bass Rock chronicled in the well-known lines of his friend, Dr. Longmuir of Aberdeen. Indeed the latter had for him peculiar associations through one of the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles II.—James Fraser of Brea;—for, when the sun set on the upland farm on which he had been born, Miller knew that it was time to collect his tools at the end of his day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on the geological expedition which he has commemorated by his paper on the structure of the Bass, his thoughts again reverted to Fraser, and to two other captives from his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and Hog of Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period introduced him to Burns and Fergusson, while from his boyish days the old novel of Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, had been no less familiar than from the pages of David Copperfield we know it to have been to Dickens. It was, therefore, with no small interest that he caught his first view of Arthur Seat and the masts of the shipping in the harbour of Leith. It was still the veritable Auld Reekie' of Fergusson, preserving its quaint distinctiveness by the happy blending of the divisions of the old town and the new—the old town through which, says Lockhart, the carriage of Scott would creep at the slowest of paces, driven by the most tactful and discriminating of Jehus, while every gable and buttress in what a recent prosaic English guide-book denominates the most dilapidated street in Europe would crowd its storied memories upon the novelist and poet of the Chronicles of the Canongate. To the last, like Carlyle, he preserved the memory, ever a landmark to the patriotic Scot, of his first day in the old 'romantic town' of Sir Walter, and of his impressions of the most picturesque of European capitals.

CHAPTER II

IN EDINBURGH—THE CROMARTY BANK

'I view yon Empress of the North

Sit on her hilly throne.'

Scott.